My shiny Mac Pro just arrived along with a pair of Dell 28 Ultra HD (P2815Q) Monitors (2160p). I anxiously plugged everything in, fired up Google Chrome, and waited…and waited…and waited…and waited. The dreaded spinning pinwheel of death greeted me and it took minutes for each page to load. Not even the chrome://settings/ or chrome://version/ pages would load. Chrome was basically unusable.

Odd, since everything was running fine when I had the Mac Pro plugged into my Sony R550A 60″ HDTV (1080p). I begrudgingly switched to Safari and started to do some digging.

Turns out the latest Chrome Stable and Chrome Beta (as of 13-Mar-2014) eat themselves right in the face when plugged into 4K or UHD displays. I’m unable to find a specific bug report but I did manage to find a single general complaint thread in the Google Product Forums from Oct/Nov 2013. Turns out I’m not the only one experiencing this problem.

Managing multiple facilities across multiple continents can be a pain especially when Wi-Fi is involved. Different regions use different frequencies depending on regulatory domain. And, depending on your hardware vendor, compliant hardware could be backordered.

In my case, the Cisco Aironet 1140 Series Access Point (AIR-AP1142N-T-K9 802.11a/g/n Standalone AP; Int Ant; Taiwan C) is backordered by 4-6 weeks. I guess our Taipei 101 office is out of luck for a while unless I can find a different piece of compliant hardware.

Here are some miscellaneous regulatory notes for when I need to revisit this in the future:

Since Operation Stop Being a Fatass 2.0 is progressing rather satisfactorily (down 15 pounds this month) I’ll be pulling my trusty 1992 GT Karakoram Full Rigid out of storage so I can give it a proper tuneup and start hitting the trails again. With the exception of racing my nephews up and down the cul-de-sac I haven’t gone riding since Summer of 2004 and the Karakoram desperately needs some TLC since it was ridden hard and put away wet without any end of season maintenance. I got fat and it started rusting.

Assuming I actually follow through, start riding again, and hit my initial goal weight of 240ish pounds by the end of the Summer I’ll definitely upgrade to a 2012 GT Karakoram 1.0 Hardtail 29er. No way I’m going to drop the coin to go full suspension unless I get under 200 pounds and am doing some serious miles. And if the wife wants to start riding as well then a 2012 GT Palomar Hardtail will probably be in her future.

It’s been seven years since I mused about weight loss on this Blog. And in that seven years I’ve embarrassingly regained almost all the weight I so elatedly lost and enthusiastically wrote about. An unfortunate combination of work, stress, and a complete lack of healthful motivation turned those seven years into a crash course of unhinged weight gain.

I saw and felt it happening as I ballooned back up to a 46″ waist and had to dig out my cache of old 2XL geek and hacker t-shirts that had been packed away for nostalgic reasons. But even as I jumped up each size I just didn’t care. And on New Year’s Day of this year I weighed in at 308.6 pounds. Not quite the 330 pounds I weighed at my all-time high in 1998 but a Hell of a lot more than the 220ish pounds I weighed at my last health-related entry in 2004.

So Operation Stop Being a Fatass 1.0 ended in failure but Operation Stop Being a Fatass 2.0 is well underway thanks to some hardy motivation from my lovely wife since we’ve both vowed to get back into shape together. Since the beginning of January I’ve dropped 12.6 pounds and I’m down to 296 pounds. That may seem like a tiny victory but it’s a victory nonetheless.

The Hacker’s Diet is still my primary motivation and going back to Blogging about my fat ass will definitely help but I’ve also added some additional tools to my aresenal:

For you mobile geeks out there HP Home currently has 3-cell batteries for the HP Mini 1000 and 110 on sale for 60% off as well as a $15-off coupon you can use (ACY93421). No idea how long this is going to last.

Short of a server going down, one of the quickest and most effective ways for a Blog to die is for it to drop out of search engines. Sure, you might have a ton of repeat visitors, but no search ranking means no new visitors because, well, no one can find you. What a blinding flash of the obvious.Continue reading How to murder a Blog→

If you have a mixed bag of Polycom kit in your office, be sure to check out the VoIP SIP Software Release Matrix to check on compatible versions. In our case, I chose SIP version 3.1.3RevC since it’s compatible with both the IP 430 and the IP 4000. I’ll probably bump up to SIP version 3.2.0 for the IP 430; just not today.

Also pay special attention to the release notes. Just because a Firmware version is on the download page for a particular model doesn’t mean it will work. We had to mix and match with Firmware version 4.1.3 for the IP 4000 and 4.2.0 for the IP 430. This is difficult (but not impossible) since pre-4.0 Firmware versions look for bootrom.ld instead of modelnumber.bootrom.ld in 4.0 and higher versions.Continue reading Upgrading Polycom firmware→

The aging Red Hat Enterprise ES4 server I have colocated at ServerBeach was starting to get a bit crufty and I felt kind of dirty running RHEL instead of Ubuntu now that I’m working for Canonical. It was finally time to bring up a shiny new Dell PowerEdge 440 running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Hardy Heron however ServerBeach does not yet officially support Ubuntu and will not do custom OS loads.

No problem. ServerBeach provides a brilliant tool called RapidRescue that allows you to reboot your server into a Linux recovery session and gives remote console access to the disks and hardware. I whipped together an awful hack to take advantage of this tool and automate the process of formatting the hard drives and debootstrapping an Ubuntu install. Not exactly elegant, but it gets the job done. 😀

MS-DOS or another DOS derivative is still required for flashing the BIOS on some desktops, servers, notebooks, and mobile devices. These tools automate the creation of boot floppies and USB thumbdrives instead of fighting with tools like MKBT (Make Bootable).

A couple years ago Google acquired Nik Software and heavily discounted the price of the entire Nik Collection to just $149. An amazing deal considering the bundle weighed in at around $500 before the acquisition. Now you can get 15% off and drop that price down to just $126.65! During checkout apply coupon code cdodds and the […]

Dell’s groundbreaking Dell 28 Ultra HD Monitor – P2815Q was announced at CES and has been listed as Coming Soon and available January 23 (tomorrow). This will probably be the defacto Mac Pro monitor until Apple releases new affordable Apple-branded displays. Well, good news. The $699.99 P2815Q appears to be available for sale early but you have to search […]

Those of you in the UDS-R (Raring Ringtail) group photo must have been quite disappointed this time around! Instead of having to climb precarious ladders or hang out of third-story windows to get the shot I had a nice stable balcony to stand on! Truth be told, while taping the boundaries, my cohort Brian and I were trying to […]

I’m a little late to the game but Adobe Creative Suite 6 was announced a month or so ago. Rather than pay the $1,000+ to follow the CS5 to CS6 Design & Web Premium upgrade path I opted instead to subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud which grants full access to Master Collection. At $29/month for the first year […]

Trunkmonkey Racing will be in attendance at the Greater Boston NEMBA Dark Hollow Pond trail project at Middlesex Fells Reservation this coming Sunday (April 27, 2014). Come join us bright and early to move some dirt, build some singletrack, and open up Dark Hollow Pond to mountain bikes! For more information, please see the event […]

Back in November an amazing video popped up in my Feedly called Angel’s Share: Exploring Scotland’s Singletrack and Single Malt. I’m a big fan of mountain biking. I’m a big fan of Scotch. And I’m a fan of Ben Howard whom I’ve heard a few times and was chosen for the soundtrack. But a couple of days […]

What’s the best way to wind down after a hard day of trail building and mountain biking? Alcohol and bacon of course! And how do we combine the two into a single snack for uncomplicated gluttonous consumption? With Chippoke’s Cabin Fever Maple Whisky Bacon Grease Infused Bacon Crumble Brown Sugar Caramelized Ghost Chile Chex Mix! Just […]

Trunkmonkey Racing backs Mac Ride! This is insanely cool. What happens when you cross a kid named Mac and a Mountain Bike? You get Mac Ride, a Kickstarter out of Vancouver, eh! From their Web site: It was my wish for our children to benefit from these same outdoor adventures as well as my passion for […]